> However, one thing that no one ever talks about or thinks through is that a lot of that "waste" is someone else's job and pension. If you cut 90% of the staff at all welfare and other programs offices, those people need other jobs or have to go on the same programs.
Framed another way, we've freed up more people for more beneficial jobs. If those don't exist (and broad classes of jobs are eliminated all the time with practitioners finding alternative employment, so I'm skeptical they wouldn't) then your argument boils down to the ideal form of welfare for those people being make-work exactly matching their current situation. That may be the case, but it doesn't seem blindingly obviously true for any reason I can see.
> If everyone gets it, do prices just rise to meet that reality and soak up the "free" money.
Maybe, but you'd probably expect the opposite effect in most markets (and indeed, for similar policies like a higher minimum wage we typically observe small increases or small decreases in prices as a result). As a low-order approximation, the demand curve would have a (nonuniform) rightward shift where for any given item/price an equal or greater quantity are demanded because people are better able to afford things. Assuming a monotonically decreasing supply curve, that would move the equilibrium to more things being sold at a lower price.
That of course fails if any of the assumptions are violated (and ignores any other effects like increased taxation) -- e.g. at any price building new housing in the Bay is capped for all intents and purposes, so ignoring any other effects one might expect housing prices to continue to increase here. Housing in most places would probably eventually have a small dip/slowdown in price though, and commodities almost certainly would.
> We'll need regulations (and people to enforce them) to make sure housing prices stay reasonable for lower income people.
Arguably yes (though price fixing might not be the best solution to that problem), but that seems independent of the UBI question.
> but we should be helping more people and the well off can afford to pay 1% more of their largess to do so.
We should help more people, but I think it's more expensive than you're imagining. The top 1% of families make $400B (give or take $100B). 1% of that is an extra $500 per family below the poverty line, or $50 per bottom-99% family. It's not nothing, but $300/yr barely covers a single person's worth of beans and rice if they have the means to find a cheap bulk source, if power/water/time for cooking are free, if they're on the smaller side and not doing strenuous labor, and if they eat no vegetables or anything to offset that nutrient deficiency.